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The Russian Novel as a Serial Murder
or The Poetics of Bureaucracy
Boris Groys
It is a well-known truism that Russian subjectivity hopes to see and
discover itself in the first place in the mirror of the nineteenth century
Russian classical novel. In his novel Roman, Vladimir Sorokin turns
to the tradition of the Russian classical novel in order to pose once
again the question of Russia and of how Russia defines itself within
this tradition. Roman was written in 1985-89 and was published in
Moscow in 1994.1 In this period occurred the downfall of the Soviet
Union, Soviet communism, Soviet ideology and Soviet literature,
whose stylistics Sorokin used in his earlier texts. When on the ruins
of the Soviet Union Russia appeared anew, the broad masses of the
Russian intelligentsia turned to the pre-revolutionary tradition of
Russian culture and especially the village-dacha culture looking
for authentic roots, values and orientation. The Russian landscape
and the tender, good and patient Russian national character, sung by
classical Russian literature, again took their place of honour in the
general mythology. Sorokins novel is, in the first place, a reaction
to this mythology.
The plot of the novel is quite simple. The action takes place
somewhere in old pre-revolutionary Russia. The young lawyer Ro-
man Vospevennikov gives up his lawyers practice and life in the
big city, which he finds banal and tedious. In search of freedom he
goes to live in a village, where he intends to occupy himself partly
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with farming and partly with painting, for which he discovered a
sudden and unexpected calling. Roman takes up his quarters with
his relatives, the couple Vospevennikov, who once took the place of
his dead parents. Against the background of the typical life of a ni-
neteenth-century nobleman in a village: hunting, fishing, mowing,
extinguishing fire, visiting the church, et cetera, the hero meets the
heroine, Tatyana, the foster-daughter of a forester. After the decla-
ration of love follows the wedding, which culminates in Romans
slaying with an axe first all his relatives and acquaintances and next
all the peasants in the village. Afterwards he performs a kind of
black mass in the local church, using the entrails of his victims, kills
Tatyana and at last dies himself. The first, longest part of the novel,
more than 300 pages, is devoted to the description of Romans life
in the village until the moment of the extermination of the villagers
and has been written as a typical nineteenth-century novel la Tol-
stoy and Dostoyevsky. The second, much shorter part (less than
100 pages) has been written in an ultra-modernist prose-style and
contains only the description of the ritual of destruction and self-
destruction staged by the hero.
The sudden change from the traditional, psychological way of
story-telling to literary modernism coincides with the sudden change
in the heros behaviour, which goes far beyond ordinary human be-
haviour. Without any doubt, this moment of change is crucial for the
understanding of the entire structure of the novel. Moreover, such a
sudden change is characteristic for the greater part of Sorokins
texts, especially his short stories, and is, therefore, expected by the
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impression that as a matter of fact nothing has happened, except a
simple change from one style into another, so that the horrible
event loses its status of a fact of reality described by the text and is
entirely de-dramatised, appearing as an intratextual stylistic device.
Thanks to this, Sorokins texts maintain their distance from po-
pular literature and offer the possibility of what has been described
by Roland Barthes as plaisir de texte. This possibility does not en-
tirely eliminate a normal, i.e. a referential reading of Sorokins
text, evoking in the reader a delicious horror which is, as is well-
known, an unequivocal sign of popular literature. In this manner,
Sorokin offers two competing ways of reading, a referential and a
non-referential one, or, which is the same, a popular and an elitist-
modernistic one, without predetermining the readers choice. As a
matter of fact, it is the indefiniteness and indissolubility of this
choice, that is to say the continuing tension between these two con-
flicting ways of reading, which forms the basic inner conflict of
Sorokins prose, a conflict that is not solved in the end by some
kind of synthesis or catharsis. On the contrary, this conflict mani-
fests itself on all the levels of Sorokins text, including that of ideo-
logy. In Roman he also defines the heros relationship to himself
and to Russia, so that both the subjectivity of the hero and Russia
acquire a double reading.
In the first place, it is possible to show that the novel Roman
from the first to the last page can perfectly be read in a traditionally
psychological key: as a complete and consistent story about how the
hero, Roman, is looking for and ultimately succeeds in finding him-
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self. Roman leaves the city and goes to live in the country to acquire
inner freedom and to discover himself. This zone of inner freedom
Roman explicitly associates with the image of the Russian coun-
tryside. This becomes clearly apparent from the dialogue between
Roman and Zoya, his former love, when she also strived for free-
dom, impetuously throwing herself into horse-riding and other
country pleasures, but who in time, becoming disappointed with
Russia, decided to emigrate to the West, because she became bored
with her own country (as a result of which she turned out to be the
only one who escaped the blow on the head with the axe at the end
of the novel). Roman, on the other hand, emigrates to Russia, to the
interior of the country.
Zoya, however, is almost the only doleful exception against a
generally cheerful background. All the other characters in the novel
(except doctor Klyugin, about whom we will talk later on) contin-
uously assure themselves and others that in Russia a Russian human
being feels himself so free, easy and comfortable as he could never
feel himself to be in the West. Such assertions, and the descriptions
which confirm them, exclamations as Perfect! Wonderful, spee-
ches and toasts in praise of life in the countryside, Russian natural
beauty and the Russian people, delight in Russian food et cetera,
forms a significant part of the text of the novel. In its characters,
Roman himself included, this sense of freedom through direct
contact with nature (fishing, hunting, mowing, pick-nicking, taking
part in the life of the peasants, all of which is considered to belong
to natural life) is particularly strong. This contact with nature
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invariably brings the characters to a state of blissful ecstasy. Nature
functions here as an unconditional value and as the only source of
freedom and happiness. Sorokin accentuates the fundamental themes
of the nineteenth-century Russian novel: the salutary union of nature
and freedom, the turning away from civilisation, simplification, go-
ing back to the sources, et cetera. And it is obvious that we have to
deal here with a more fundamental aspect of Russian literature than
the usual division in Westerners and Slavophiles, not to mention the
other less important ideological subdivisions.
The opposition between natural freedom and servility as regards
the conditions of civilisation has a long tradition in European culture
and is symbolised in modern times in the first place by the name of
Rousseau. For Rousseau, Nature functions as the bearer of the
good, civilisation as the bearer of evil. By Nature he understands
natural man who lives in the heart of everyone: the contemplation
of external nature has in the first place the pedagogical function of
resuscitating natural freedom and natural good which have been
buried in the hearts of men by the conditions of civilisation. It is this
pedagogy which is practised by the Russian novel as Sorokin un-
derstands it. The traditional Rousseau theme is in this case, how-
ever, connected with the complementary and very important theme
of Russia. The opposition between nature and civilisation is under-
stood at the same time as the opposition between Russia and the
West, and Russian literature is, of course, on the side of Russia.
There is nothing new here, however. The German romantics already
used the opposition between the natural and the artificial to describe
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the opposition Germany/France, natural being on the side of Ger-
many, although the entire conception had been borrowed from the
Frenchman Rousseau. Russian literature transfers the same oppo-
sition to the opposition Russia/the West, Russifying Rousseau and
placing Germany under the artificial West, after having borrowed
from the German romantics their rhetorical device.
It is not by chance that Roman goes to live in the country, in Rus-
sian nature, renouncing the written, codified, artificial law which he
served as a lawyer.3 To ironise written law and legal proceedings is
a frequent device in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The
written, artificial law, a man-made creation, is opposed to inner free-
dom, granted by nature, life itself. Freedom cannot be determined
by written, legal rights. Natural life itself is a zone of freedom. For
that reason, Russia, as the incarnation of the natural, is synonymous
with real freedom, as it does not have formal, written, legal free-
dom. Russian literature, as Sorokin understands it, proclaims life
itself, freed from all external restraints, as the highest value. The in-
ner freedom of a Russian lies deeper than all the external freedom of
western people, because freedom is another name for life. And this
inner freedom is completely realised when man and nature, life, are
fused and not when man is separated from life, as it happens within
the system of legal rights, which isolates the individual and forms
the basis of city life, considered slavish by Roman.
At the same time, the search for natural freedom within the space
of the Russian novel runs against certain restrictions imposed on the
individual by collective life, God and good, which in the Russian
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possibility of freedom through its functioning in the teleologically
organised novelistic narration is continuously demonstrated by So-
rokin in the first part of his novel. We can find many examples of it.
From time to time the hero thinks that nature and God are indifferent
to his fate and to the fate of people in general; these thoughts,
however, inevitably lead to a still greater belief and the change of his
fate for the better. Characteristic in this respect is the episode in the
church, when Roman at first diverts his attention from the church
service, in order to give himself up to inner doubt: The deacon
read, and Roman became more and more absorbed in his sorrow,
his eyes indifferently travelling over the faces... How unsteady and
treacherous is everything in this world of human feelings, he
thought, there is nothing to rely on, there is nothing in which you
can believe without being deceived later on... et cetera. This drif-
ting away from the church service has, however, the advantage that
Roman for the first time sees his future wife, Tatyana, who appears
to be the image of real belief.
The rhetoric of moral internal monologue, which clearly refers to
Tolstoy, is rather often used by Sorokin without any direct moti-
vation of the plot, as, for instance, in the scene of the marriage of
Roman and Tatyana, in which Roman again is overcome by nihi-
listic thoughts: They sing, not understanding what and why they
are singing. But why is it so gentle, so innocent? Or, perhaps, they
know everything?... But their incomprehension and innocence do
not make it easier for me! Soon after, however, he accepts the
world: This was the light of hope... To hope, hope, that everything
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which is going on is right that is left to us! et cetera. Thus the
considerations about earthly vanity in the sense of Schopenhauer
leads the hero every time to the good in the sense of Tolstoy.
Sorokin does not forget Dostoyevsky: Tatyanas foster-father
makes Roman play Russian roulette with him. It seems as if the he-
roes are directly exposed to death, but, in the end, nobody is killed;
everyone is satisfied, affected even and Roman and Tatyana re-
ceive the blessing. Even the central episode in the first part of the
novel in which Roman, inspired by noble feelings, fights a wolf,
but discovers in himself a wolfish element, mixing his blood with
that of the wolf and registering natures indifference to his fate, ends
with the fact that Roman finds himself in Tatyanas house, which
leads to the marriage of the heroes. And Roman is treated by doctor
Klyugin who the only one of the novels heroes straightly pro-
claims nihilistic views.
Klyugin partly stands outside the general Russian idyll (already
suggested by his name, clearly derived from the German word
klug clever). But even the radically nihilistic speeches, well-
known to the reader of Russian nineteenth-century literature, do not
place Klyugin outside the domain of the novels good: Klyugin is
an excellent doctor, would not harm a fly, et cetera. In this way the
freedom of nature is continuously obstructed in the Russian novel
by the teleology of the good. For Roman to discover freedom in
himself, he should leave the space of the Russian novel, free himself
of the laws of realistic literary description and narration.
This liberation is realised by the hero, to all appearances, in the
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second part of the novel. From the moment that Roman raises the
axe in order to destroy the villagers undialectically, he begins to
withdraw himself more and more from the control of the traditional
Russian novel. The descriptions of nature and of the inner state of
the hero disappear from the text; there is no attempt any longer to
psychological motivation nor to reconstruction of relations of cause
and effect. The text of the novel changes more and more into a me-
rely external recording of what happens and as a result loses its con-
ventional literalness. Natures freedom is demonstrated by the possi-
bility to understand it and to reconstruct its internal laws, by its pure
processionality and operationality. In this respect, it is typical that
the de-teleologization of freedom in the second part of the novel
refers back to the same episodes as the teleologization in the first
part: in the second part everything turns out to be realised which re-
mained blocked-up in the first part.
For the killing of the inhabitants of the novels space, Roman
uses an axe, given to him as a present for his marriage by Klyugin,
and on which is written: Swing and strike! Klyugin, by the
way, does not only preach nihilism, (with which the axe of the
peoples war and Raskolnikovs axe are associated), but argues
about libido and thanatos, presenting in this way the key to the un-
derstanding of the ritual of the killing as erotic. Tatyana accompanies
the hero, ringing the little bell, which had also been given as a
wedding present, by the village idiot who, as could be expected,
represents the wild, irrational and destructive side of Orthodoxy.
Many other scenes of the first part allude to the end of the novel: the
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description of the murder of Tatyanas parents, the hunting scene,4
the scene of the fight with the wolf, et cetera. Moreover, the first
part of the novel suggests the interpretation of the religious-erotic
ritual performed by Roman in the second part as the equivalent of
the wedding-night: after the long ritual of the wedding, in which the
ecstasy of the good reaches an unbearable degree of collective
hysterics, there was nothing else the heroes could do than kill
everybody and die themselves, in order to reach communion in love.
The operations performed by Roman on the body of Tatyana are
also clearly erotic. Besides, Roman has an orgasm only after he has
removed all the others, Tatyana included, and finally desecrates
the church to escape the eyes of God.
Nevertheless, highly important for a possible psychological inter-
pretation of the transition to the second part of the novel can be
considered a short scene in which Roman requires from Tatyana an
absolute faith in freedom and Tatyana answers positively. Sorokin
demonstrates here what could have happened if Onegin, without any
regard for the conventions of society, had married Tatyana. They
would have been a pair of natural-born killers, who would have
gone further on the path of the abolition of conventions until the
complete extermination of all the representatives of these conven-
tions. The traditional Rousseau-like aspiration of the Russian novel
to freedom and nature is realised in the extreme, in the form of
absolute terror. Roman becomes a serial killer who definitively frees
his inner, natural freedom from the gaze, description and under-
standing of others. The hero, who realises this freedom in himself,
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completely emancipates himself from the author, from the narration,
from the laws of the literary text as such. Not for nothing is the hero
called Roman: the inner intention of the novel is realised exclusively
in the hero himself, leaving no place for the external, for descrip-
tion. Roman stops being text and becomes life. If Bakhtin describes
the poetics of Dostoyevskys novels as being orientated to the equa-
lity of author and hero, Sorokin stages, to all appearances, the defi-
nitive victory of the author over the hero: the hero destroys every-
thing that can be described and finally himself as the object of
description. The novel ends with the death of the hero, as the hero
before his death succeeds in destroying everything in the space of
the novel that still could be described and narrated. Sorokins Ro-
man can, therefore, be read as the definitive victory of nature and
freedom in Russia over the text, the law and the West, something
which the nineteenth-century Russian novel could not achieve.
Besides, the literary radicalisation of natural freedom outside the
boundaries of the usual social conventions had already been realised
rather conclusively by Marquis de Sade in the context of French
Enlightenment. In their elaborate philosophical deliberations the li-
bertines of De Sade draws conclusions from Rousseaus demand to
follow unconditionally the voice of nature with which Rousseau
himself probably would not agree. Moreover, however, De Sade is
in his turn extremely didactic and subjects the description of erotic
orgies to a strict ritual. The reductional registering of pure proces-
sion, or pure ritualism, by means of which in the second part of
Sorokins novel nature apparently demonstrates its absolute free-
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dom, stylistically directly refers to De Sade. Moreover, as Roland
Barthes rightly remarks, De Sades erotic rituals are themselves or-
ganised as language: by means of various operations of fragmen-
tation, these rituals realize the articulation of bodies, transforming
these bodies into elements of language.5 The religious-erotic ritual,
described by Sorokin, also consists of the fragmentation of bodies
and of the introduction of a new system of combinations which pla-
ces the fragments of these bodies in new relations to each other,
now not subjected to natural, organic logic, but to the syntax of a
new language, by means of which Roman formulates his messages
to God and the world: Roman places the intestines of his victims in
the church, puts stones on the intestines, heads on the stones, etc. In
this manner, natural freedom again turns out to be completely sub-
jected to the syntax of language. Even Romans last death spasms
are described by reduced subject-predicate constructions which,
among other things, refer to texts by Sergey Tretyakov. In the mo-
ment just before his death when freedom reaches its greatest
intensity, Roman subjects himself totally to the fundamental laws of
the functioning of language. The emigration from the idyllic
Rousseauistic Russian village to the domain of pure desire or the
pure religious-erotic subconscious turns out to be just as illusory as
the earlier move from the city to the village. Again, the hero does not
find inner freedom, but only moves from text into text, from
language into language.
From this point of view, the scenes of mass destruction in the
second part of the novel begin to look different. We do not see here
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the self-liberation of the hero but, rather, the destruction of the
signifieds of the novel, with the aim to leave only the signifiers.
When all the referents of the novel have died, only its text remains.
The orgy of destruction and self-destruction staged by Sorokin does
not signify in this case the victory of natural freedom over the laws
of the text but, on the contrary, the definitive victory of the text over
its natural referents and its own organic meaning.
In one of his articles on Rousseau, devoted to the deconstruction
of the Rousseauistic myth about Nature, Paul de Man writes that the
description of the fragmentation and mutilation of the human body,
which we often encounter in literature, serves as a metaphor for the
fragmentation and mutilation of the text itself.6 This fragmentation of
the text occurs as a result of censoring, quotation and other manipu-
lations of the text, which disclose the disorganisation, the machine-
like character of every text. In this way, the ritual of dismember-
ment described by Sorokin, can be understood as the metaphor of
textuality. Characteristically, Sorokins novel begins with the
description of Romans grave in the village graveyard which, in its
turn, reminds one of De Mans famous discussions of the trans-
formation of the body into the text of the epitaph in which the
graveyard also plays a role.7
So then, Sorokins hero dies, looking for inner freedom but not
finding it. The only thing he is capable of turns out to be emigration
from one text to another or, in other words, from under the power
of one syntax, writing, law into the power of another one. The death
of the hero, however, in this case also means the death of the
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author. Not for nothing is the hero called Roman. With his death
dies the genre of the novel, and also the author-novelist. The author
and the hero of the novel, as has been rightly noted by Bakhtin in
his time, are connected in one chain. The author has power over
language only in so far as he uses language to describe the freedom
of the hero outside language. If it turns out that the hero does not
have such a freedom, as he cannot free himself from the power of
language, together with him the author also loses his freedom: he
changes into a passive medium of language structures and the self-
development of the text. But this also means that the death of the
hero coincides with the death of the author, so that both receive a
joint epitaph from contemporary post-structuralist literary theory.
At first sight it would seem as if Sorokin, by his text, confirms
this diagnosis. But when we take a closer look, it turns out that
although the author of the novel dies, this dead author is not Sorokin
himself, but his double, a fake figure, a literary mask, alter-ego,
specially predestined to be shot down. The point is that the entire
novel is, as it were, written on the account of another or, to be more
correct, on the account of others. The worn-out and at the same time
recognisable stylistics of the novel unmistakably show that the
author is not Sorokin, but some other, who completely seriously
writes a Russian novel. It is this other who turns out to be the dead
author and who, for that matter, has appeared as such from the
very beginning, not being able to write a live, sincere, not banal but
original, authentic and not worn-out authors language. The citatio-
nal, pseudonymic, personage-like character of Sorokins prose is,
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however, not indicative of reduction and death, but of the survival
of the author, who hides himself behind his masks-doubles that he
sacrifices to his hero.
Sorokin belongs to the literary-artistic movement which arose in
the beginning of the 70s within the context of Moscow unofficial
art, i.e., the art practised outside the official Soviet cultural institu-
tions, and which is generally called Moscow conceptualism.8 This
term refers back to the Western, in the first place Anglo-American
variant of artistic conceptualism, represented, for instance, by the
works of the groups Art and Language or Joseph Kosuth. Within
the context of the art of the sixties and seventies, the American con-
ceptualists very consistently enforced the principle of ascesis in art,
radically excluding all references to the world of visual temptations.
By placing the text instead of the picture in the space of the work of
art, Western conceptualism demonstrated its radical opposition
against the commercial mass culture of its time.
However, the basic features of conceptualism at the same time
turned out to be closely related to some central aspects of official So-
viet mass aesthetics, which also understood art as an illustration to
particular political-theoretical propositions. The asceticism of Wes-
tern conceptualism and its utopian-pedagogical pathos could also be
easily recognised by the Soviet spectator and reader, especially if he
was familiar with the theory and aesthetics of the Russian avant-
garde. In the first place, however, Western conceptualism won the
Soviet spectator over by the spirit of contemporary bureaucracy
which permeated its artistic practice. The works of the conceptualists
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remind us of the documentation of big companies and public insti-
tutions. Moreover, the conceptualist takes up an emphatically exter-
nal, programmatically disinterested position as regards his own
work. In its complete opposition to the traditional modernist orien-
tation towards self-expression, this programmatical distance from its
own art calls to mind the contemporary bureaucrat who controls the
property of other people and for that purpose enforces laws not
formulated and passed by him.
The utterly bureaucratic Soviet society of the Brezhnev period,
which excluded from its very beginning any form of self-expres-
sion, be it artistic or political, can therefore be considered an excel-
lent example of conceptual art. The Moscow conceptualists looked at
the matter exactly in this way. Hence their specific strategy, which is
difficult to describe in terms used for the Western artistic move-
ments. The Moscow conceptualists did not see in their work a utopic
alternative to the mass culture that surrounded them, as was the case
in American conceptualism, but a reflection in response to the
functioning of Soviet mass culture, i.e. a culture that functions with-
in the space of an already realised utopia. For that reason, the mini-
malist-conceptualist devices were not used in Moscow in the seven-
ties for the construction of an autonomous work of art, as was the
case with the founding fathers of conceptualism, but for the recon-
struction of devices which had already been applied for the building
of an autonomous socialist society in one country. In this way,
Moscow conceptualism aesthetically reacted at the pedagogical and
bureaucratic doctrines of Soviet culture and at its being dominated
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by the ideological text.
Accordingly, Moscow conceptualism also changed the character
of the texts used in the space of the work of art. Whereas the Ameri-
can conceptualists in the first place lean on the great academic Ang-
lo-American philosophical tradition of logical positivism, the Mos-
cow conceptualists use texts of daily life, ideological, bureaucratic
texts and literary texts that have become a part of Soviet mass con-
sciousness as, for instance, texts by Pushkin, Tolstoy or Dosto-
yevsky. And Moscow literary conceptualism treats the texts they use
in the same way as contemporary art works do with visual ready
mades. It does not identify itself with these texts, but quotes them
as symptoms of the culture within which it exists, and which it ne-
vertheless is able to analyse from an external position. The analogy
between the bureaucratic and conceptualist work with texts led to the
integration of an enormous mass of textual material in the practice of
Moscow conceptualism: this resulted in an essential change in the
understanding of the text itself, which played a decisive role in the
development of the literary branch of Moscow conceptualism.
The fact is, that within the space of quotation the text, if presented
as a great mass, as it were, entirely loses its meaning it simply
becomes an ornament, an arabesque, a dcor. This radical de-
semantisation of the text goes much further than that which could
have been reached by the traditional avant-gardistic devices of the
destruction of the semantic unity of the text in the literary space of
the book. And besides: the conceptualist de-semantisation of the text
does not wholly require its deformation, estrangement, the intro-
duction of semantic changes in its own structure, et cetera. The most
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trivial, ordinary text immediately loses its meaning if it is without
any changes being made in its entirety taken up in the space of
quotation. In this space it simply changes into criture, according to
Derridas terminology. At the same time, we cannot consider this
change as a case of deconstruction, as it is not a matter here of the
dissolving of the original text in an endless game of diffrences: the
text remains complete and can also be read as such, i.e. with its
ordinary meaning maintained. As a result the readers consciousness
begins to waver permanently between two incompatible ways of
reading the text: on the one hand the text is considered a ready-
made, a purely visual phenomenon, an ornament deprived of any
semantics, on the other hand, however, this text can be read as a ful-
ly comprehensible utterance with a definite meaning which can ea-
sily be reconstructed.
This oscillation of the receiving consciousness between, in con-
ventional terms, the positions of the spectator and the reader, which
originated within the space of the conceptual painting, made such a
deep impression on some authors in the seventies that they felt
obliged to look for a comparable effect on the basis of purely literary
devices. The influence of the conceptualist artistic practice on litera-
ture is, therefore, in the first place the result of a specific use of the
text as part of this practice. It is not a coincidence that the best-
known representatives of Moscow literary conceptualism, Dmitry
Prigov, Lev Rubinstein and Vladimir Sorokin, began their careers as
artists or were closely connected with artistic circles.
Not only did Sorokin begin as an artist (in which he resembles
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his hero Roman), but during a number of years he earned his living
as a designer of books, just as the founder-fathers of Moscow con-
ceptualism, Ilya Kabakov and Eric Bulatov, whose artistic practice
played a decisive role in the forming of Sorokins literary method.
In a certain sense, literary conceptualism can be defined as the de-
sign of the text. Being employed in book-design makes one look at
the text in the first place as a sign, which the designer fashions and
models, without paying much attention to its meaning, just as com-
puter software processes large parts of texts independently from
their semantics. This external, ready-made work with texts makes it
possible to use much larger parts of texts by others than in usual
literary quotation. Moreover, the conceptualist text-designer is, just
as Bakhtins author, not interested in the revival of the quotation,
in the logo-centric return to its authentic voice, in the creation of
polyphone, inter-textual play or a grotesque body, which ought to
bring to life the dead text. The text-designer is much more interested
in demonstrating the text as a dead text, as an absolutely passive,
non-organic sign-mass, which could be subjected to all kinds of
manipulation, cuttings, changes, transferrings from one space into
another, et cetera, without taking into account its so-called mea-
ning, just as it happens with computer text design and book design.
It is, by the way, not a matter here of a senseless text corpse: this
expression presupposes that once, in its beginning, the text lived
and only died at a later stage, after having consented to subject itself
to various pathologist experiments. On the contrary, the concep-
tualist work with a text demonstrates its originally dead, purely
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disposal this hand-made product is placed, freely and sovereignly
handles it, driving the text from one place to another, fragmentising
it, quoting it or just forbidding it, et cetera. Explicitly rejecting his
authorship and stylistically attributing his own text to another, the
author acquires in this manner the possibility to place himself, at
least symbolically, on the level of the bureaucrat and handles his
own text as it were from the outside, i.e. sovereignly.
Within the context of the Soviet culture of that epoch, the
corresponding strategies were made much easier by the fact that
there was a sharp opposition between the official mass culture and
the samizdat, handmade books of unofficial culture. The device of
the ready-made which is employed in contemporary art, consists in
the artists individual appropriation of the products of artistic mass-
and series-production. The practice of the device of the ready-made
in literature is usually complicated by the fact that literature in mo-
dern times only exists in printed form, i.e. the mass production of
books. In the Russian samizdat of the sixties and seventies, on the
contrary, the book functioned as a unique manuscript, or as an indi-
vidual object, after the manner of a medieval hand-written text. It
was precisely this form of samizdat-manuscript that for the Moscow
conceptualist authors played the role of quotation space, supplying
the place of the conceptual painting.
At first sight, the direct transposition of this device from the
samizdat into printed literature seems to be impossible. But at the
same time also in its printed existence literature maintains its unique
space of quotation: the library. There are no libraries identical to
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each other, although in each one books are collected which have
been printed in editions. One can say that Sorokins texts represent
such unique personal libraries, in which in one book texts are col-
lected which belong, as might be expected, to different libraries in
the censured Soviet situation particularly, such texts were not able to
co-exist in the same space, in one library.
In this way, Moscow conceptualism refrained from the oppo-
sition against the bureaucratically neutral, purely external and repres-
sive, official text operations by means of the creation of its own,
unique, authentic and individual language, apparently not subjected
to such a bureaucratic operation, as was required by the modernist
utopias of high and pure literature. Instead of that, the conceptua-
list author voluntarily sacrifices his individuality and by means of
this sacrifice succeeds in raising himself symbolically to the bureau-
cratic level of power, which permits him to oppose the strategies of
the bureaucratic text manipulation with his own manipulating strate-
gies.
When we consider the text of Roman from the point of view of
these strategies, one can say that Sorokin combines the typical syn-
thetic text of a Russian novel, which has passed the Soviet stylis-
tically-ideological censure, with a fragment of just as conventional
modernist prose, which by the same censorship is eliminated from
the repertoire of possible variants of literary writing. Two of these
text fragments are sewn together, one can say, with white threads,
which it would be nave to consider as the manifestation of the psy-
chology of the hero. It turns out to be that in this second interpre-
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tation the absolute natural freedom of the hero appears there, where
we find purely external, a-semantic and non-organic, bureaucratic
manipulations with texts understood as dead sign masses.
It now becomes clear how Sorokin remains alive after the death
of his double, i.e. the honest, authentic author, who tries to describe
the freedom of the hero. Sorokin remains alive as the author-bureau-
crat, the censor or the text designer, who manipulates his text from
the outside, from the other side of its contents, from the other side
of its referentiality. Such a freedom of the author-bureaucrat as re-
gards his text does not require the freedom of the hero. It does not
presuppose natural freedom, nor the protection of natural human
rights. With his novel Roman Sorokin gives all that is natural to na-
ture, i.e. to death. The other author dies, he who believed in natural
freedom. And, basically, this is not the Russian but the Western au-
thor: Rousseau, De Sade. It is the Frenchman who, brought up with
Roman and Romanesque culture, believes in the Romantic tradition
of individual freedom and for that reason writes novels. On the other
hand, it is the Russian intelligent, the subject of the dynasty of the
Romanovs, who goes deep into the interior of Russia to look for
natural freedom and the Third Rome. Such a Roman, of course, as a
result gives up the ghost, but this does not completely discourage
the Russian writer.
The Russian author, having grown up with the power of bureau-
cracy and censorship, i.e. with the spectacle of an unrestrictedly free
and at the same time meaningless-mechanical manipulation of texts,
believes in another, secret, i.e. bureaucratic freedom and finds there
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his true freedom. Sorokins novel Roman is, just as many other
texts of Russian conceptualism, an attempt to create a new poetics of
bureaucracy instead of a poetics of nature and to discover in
bureaucratic arbitrariness the opportunity for a new freedom of the
author after his death in language. The secret of this new freedom is
the rejection of sincerity (i.e. the rejection of self-denunciation, of
self-revelation in language, which threatens death) and the decision
to write from the dead doubles who are not threatened by anything.
Russian subjectivity discovers here the Russian bureaucracy as a
new utopia and a new idyll, inaccessible for the nave consciousness
of the Roman, Romanesque West. In retrospect, one can say that the
poet Fyodor Tyutchev again turns out to be right when he observes
that Russia is a region which is unknowable, i.e. a region of real
freedom. But now he turns out to be right as a Russian bureaucrat
which, in the first place, he was, and not as a lover of Russian
nature.
Notes
1
Vladimir Sorokin, Roman. Moskva 1994.
2
For a discussion of Sorokins early texts see Boris Groys, The Total
Art of Stalinism. Russian Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and
Beyond. Princeton 1991.
3
The prototype for Sorokin was, probably, Kandinsky, who also gave
up a career in the legal profession to look for real Russian art; this led
him, as a matter of fact, to Mnchen.
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